Interfaces

Interesting GUI history here (where i found these pictures of the 1984 and 1986 [color] Macintosh desktop displays below)

1984

1986

Also, I looked up Blade Runner to see what Lev's words represent, because how can I make a visual comparison for his concepts without looking up what he's comparing them to? A very interesting trailer to the film. If that was made in 1982, Lev sure is right: the futuristic style portrayed in that film is still highly visibly in use today. And, Harrison Ford was quite the hunk.

Just thought those were helpful visuals for me. Moving along.

Interfaces. Lev said:

"the computer interface acts as a code that carries cultural messages in a variety of media" (64).

If I'm understanding correctly this " 'non-transparency of the code' idea" that Lev's getting at, this is how I'd translate it: 

Say a message from an alien language is coming to Earth through the universe. Our satellites catch the frequency and start sorting through the components of the language to present/translate it for us earthlings to understand. Come to find out the message came with picture and text (multimedia aliens) and our satellites recreate these coded medias, passing them along to be displayed on computers. But then this non-transparency of the code idea comes into play (the satellite cut, now it pastes).

"A code may also provide its own model of the world, its own logical system, or ideology; subsequent cultural messages or whole languages created with this code will be limited by its accompanying model, system, or ideology" (64).

So because our computers are programmed and designed with only so much original capacity and code, the alien language may have alterations in its presentation through interpretation of language by code. As Lev said,

"it may make some messages easy to conceive and render others unthinkable" (64).

So, a piece of media will have an original source, but once extended into hyperspace, the interface used to pluck it from oblivion and place it on the screen will have its own possibly altered interpretation for displaying the media.

But not only that. The way we come to see media depends on how it is presented to us: we interpret through what we're shown. Another layer to the interface: our own face.

I sure hope that's a good interpretation by my inner-face (brain) because otherwise I'ma be lost.

So, the human-computer interface helps humans and "aliens" (coded language) get along, understand each other, even work and play together. 

New media can be separated into content and interface when its "informational dimension" is considered (the paints [contents] existed separate from the final painting; the code existed separate from the final display [interface]), making it a different experience from that with traditional art: the focus is on the content and its abilities rather than the final product. (? That's what I'm understanding from last paragraph, page 66.) Informational versus experiential.

But if we consider "experiential" new media to be more like traditional art, we don't separate content and interface. Once the "particular configuration of space, time, and surface articulated in the work; a particular sequence of the user's activities over time in interacting with the work; [and] a particular formal, material, phenomenological user experience" (66) have been combined to create the art/experience, then "to change the interface even slightly is to change the work dramatically" (67). So in order to consider new media as art, the interface must not be altered. (Though its variable format would easily allow it to change, new media maintains integrity as art if it is treated as unalterable once its content is "published" in the interface. This touches back on the new media principle of variability.)

The interface exists on content; the content creates the experience through the interface. There is no experience without both, but the emphasis you give to whether the components are interdependent strictly or flexibly determines your own experience with the media. (My example as an editor: reading a book can be uninterrupted fun, or I can constantly focus on the [poor] uses of language and punctuation.) Entertainment versus study.

Overall, the graphical components of the interface offer an interaction for the user, which in turn constructs the user's understanding, interpretation, and acceptance of media. This gives us something of a "chicken and egg" discussion (not that egg=content therefore egg proceeds chicken (interface); no, more along the lines that media=reinterpretation of industry=review of industry=redesign of industry=new view of media . . . and so forth, and we'd be hard pressed to find which came first, art or industry?).